Featured Projects

By Sunny

On 13, Mar 2013 | In | By Sunny

Illusory inferences

The mental model theory of reasoning postulates that individuals construct mental models of the possibilities in which the premises of an inference hold and that these models represent what is true but not what is false. An unexpected consequence of this assumption is that certain premises should yield systematically invalid inferences.

This prediction is unique among current theories of reasoning, because no alternative theory, whether based on formal rules of inference or on probabilistic considerations, predicts these illusory inferences.

Recent news

Recent news

About the lab

The Mental Models and Reasoning website reports studies of the strengths and failures of human reasoning. We focus on basic research and experimental data, as well as on developing computational models of higher-level cognitive processes.